As customers search for a service provider, they often look in the phonebook, ask friends or relatives for recommendations, or otherwise try to research which service provider can best meet their specific needs and desires. One popular method for searching for and researching service providers involves searching the Internet for a list of service providers and looking for comments, ratings, reviews, or other information that describes the experience and the quality of the services that customers typically receive from particular service providers.
While web pages that provide rating and survey information about service providers obtain their information in a variety of manners, many such web pages simply allow people visiting the pages to rate and provide comments or reviews about a particular provider.
While conventional systems and methods for providing rating and survey information on the Internet maybe somewhat useful to potential customers who are researching service providers, such methods and techniques are not without their shortcomings. In one example, people who are happy with a particular service provider typically have little to no incentive to post a positive review of their provider. In contrast, people who are upset with a provider are often motivated to post a negative review of that provider as a way to hurt or otherwise express their dissatisfaction with that particular provider. As a result, certain ratings/survey websites tend to provide an overall review of a service provider that is biased by one or more people who are not necessarily representative of the provider's customer pool as a whole. In another example, certain websites that provide rating/survey information about service providers allow practically anyone who accesses the webpage to post an anonymous review. As a result, such web pages often do not and cannot ensure that the people posting reviews are or have recently been customers of the service provider's services. For instance, some web pages allow competitors, enemies, and others who want to damage a service provider's reputation and practice to pose as a customer and post fraudulent reviews about the provider. Additionally, because some websites allow reviews to be posted anonymously, some people feel no accountability for their actions and go overboard in writing positive or negative reviews about a particular service provider.
In another example, some web pages that provide rating/survey information about service providers allow those posting comments to post more than one review about a particular service provider. Consequently, such web pages allow people to skew the overall rating/survey information in a manner that unduly harms or benefits particular service providers.
In light of the aforementioned shortcomings, some service providers have become so worried that the information provided on online ratings/survey websites is biased that the providers have had their customers sign a gag agreement, or an agreement in which the customers agree not to post any form of a review about the provider on the Internet.
In short, some websites that provide ratings/survey information about service providers end up giving an unfair representation of certain service providers. Similarly, where the information provided on such web pages is skewed, fraudulent, extreme, or otherwise inaccurately represents the feelings of the provider's actual customers as a whole, the value of such information to potential customers is diminished.
Moreover, because certain websites are more likely to receive negative reviews of a service provider than they are likely to receive positive reviews, such websites tend to contain relatively large amounts of content relating to service providers who are generally considered as providing substandard services. At the same time, because such websites tend to receive or produce relatively few positive reviews, such websites tend to have a relatively small amount of content that relates to service providers who would generally be considered as providing above-standard services. Because certain search engines rank websites by the amount of content that the websites have relating to a particular service provider, the websites described above tend to bury some excellent service providers in the search engine results, while bringing substandard service providers to the top of the search results. In other words, certain conventional websites can actually promote substandard service providers while making it harder for Internet users to find information about some excellent service providers.
Thus, while techniques currently exist that are used to provide rating/survey information about service providers, challenges still exist, including challenges that diminish the overall fairness of particular ratings systems to certain service providers and the overall usefulness of the rating/survey information provided to potential customers. Accordingly, it would be an improvement in the art to augment or even replace current techniques with other techniques.